Red Star Access welcome email
The welcome email for Heineken's Red Star Access programme — an events and access membership. Two merge fields, a brand typeface, and a sweepstakes legal block that has to arrive intact in every client, because the rules it states are the ones the promotion is legally bound by.
- Client
- Heineken USA
- Discipline
- HTML Email
- Year
- 2021
- Role
- Build and cross-client QA
The brief
A welcome email for a membership programme: confirm the signup, explain what the member now has access to, prompt them to invite friends, and tell them they have been entered into a sweepstakes. Consumer tone, brand-heavy art direction, and a block of promotional legal copy at the end.
What actually shapes it
The legal block. Sweepstakes rules are not marketing copy — eligibility states, entry dates, sponsor address, carrier charges, the no-purchase-necessary clause. They are written by legal and reproduced as written. They cannot be shortened, summarised or moved behind a link, and they are set small enough that line-height decides whether anyone can actually read them. Roughly a quarter of the finished build is that block.
Two merge fields. The recipient’s name and city come from the ESP at send time. They also arrive empty sometimes, so the copy around them has to still read as a sentence when they do — a writing constraint that lands on the developer, because the developer is the one who sees it break.
A brand typeface in email. The build declares the corporate face through
@font-face, which Apple Mail honours, Gmail’s web client mostly does not, and
Outlook ignores entirely. So the stack behind it does most of the real work and
has to be chosen as carefully as the brand face itself.
This portfolio copy does not ship the brand’s licensed font files — they are not mine to redistribute — so the preview resolves the face locally if you happen to have it installed and falls back otherwise. That fallback is what a majority of recipients see in any case.
What I built
Nested tables with MSO conditional widths for Outlook, a VML fallback so the brand block keeps its background where Word’s engine would otherwise drop it, and image slices cut so the headline stays live text rather than being baked into the hero — live text survives image blocking, and image blocking is the default in a large share of inboxes.
What it took
It is a fixed 600-pixel design rather than a fluid one, and that is worth being straight about: on a phone this scales down rather than re-laying out. Fluid would have been the better build if the audience had skewed further to mobile.